Software, Hardware, Research – Results

About 4 weeks ago I was totally frustrated by the latest MS Office suite. I’m on contract at a place that has a number of Human Interface engineers, so went looking for some sympathy...

I’ve been a Word user since the first demo version came out for my Mac 512K and although I’ve used better word processing software for important docs, like a thesis and dissertation, I have become pretty good at using MS products because work has always required it.

This latest incarnation (because it feels like the Devil was involved) is so badly broken that it’s barely usable. For normal tasks in Word, I’m significantly less productive. I am forever switching menu ribbon views to do simple things like inserting unformatted text and then creating a cross-reference or inserting and equation.

The Human Interface engineer I talked to agreed, and pointed out that supposedly the whole reason MS changed everything is that they found new users learned 10% more quickly how to use MS Office. Big Deal!!! What about the rest of us that have permanently lost productivity? What about the thousands of dollars I know the company I’m contracted to has spent on MS Office training just because they chose to roll out MS Office 2007. It almost makes ya think that there’s some collusion with training companies...

Long story short, I finally did the right thing and got a family pack of iWork. Much happier now.

Just got permission from Bill Russell to use his original artwork on my home page.

Previously, I had scanned a shirt I bought from Metrowerks years ago and used the image. Metrowerks was a great little Quebec-based company that probably saved Apple’s behind back when they switched from 68K to PowerPC. As I understood things back then, Apple had the Moto SDK and dev tools available to developers to support the switch, but they were not that great. Metrowerks, who I think were into language translation and other kinds of software, struck off into PPC tool/IDE development, hiring a Master’s grad from Germany for his work on PPC compilers. Pretty gutsy, but it paid off big. They released Codewarrior with “Arnold themed” artwork and a construction metaphor. I was a loyal subscriber from about version 1 or 2 on. PowerPlant was a great platform for app building, though a bit dated now. And though I had done work with NeXTStep and Interface Builder and saw its potential, you just couldn’t get any traction developing for it. Some more info is available as per usual on Wikipedia under Metrowerks and Codewarrior.